Paperhouse

I’m down on one knee. My fingers are knotted in your tricolor cables. It’s dark, save for the flickering of tiny red and green bulbs — your eyes? You have hundreds of them. So lovely.

You’re promiscuous. Talking to thousands, okay, hundreds, okay, tens of others at once. But I don’t care. You always get me there.

I could get stranded inside of you and never leave. If true love is fascination sustained — what we’ve got is true. I could spend every hour of every day cataloging your thousandths, like a microbiologist naming each of his lover’s cells. Single by single, seven inch by seven inch, anthology by anthology; I could parcel out my days in an archivist’s reverie.

Blemishes? I don’t see them. At least, I don’t see them as such. The handmade “Don’t Touch This — No, Really.” signs duct-taped to variegated pieces of equipment? They’re Sharpie-drawn birthmarks — they define, not deface, you.

Although so much of you is metal and circuits and cloudy arc-tangents of pizza grease, you’re still untouchable. This is the key to your allure. I can clutch a microphone, feel the buzz of an amplifier, match my fingerprints to the grooves in the acetate grain, but the magic is in your ceaseless invisible waves. Invisible waves!

Yes, it’s me, right here, right now, proposing that we marry. Zombo will officiate. We’ll have no shortage of DJs. We can spend long nights together, like two peas in a podcast, and when I’m old and decrepit and you’re old and beta-versioned out of relevance, we’ll Montague and Capulet it, radio-style, needles through ourselves, until we’re spinning, spinning, spinning, 33 and 1/3 times a minute, and a delicious howling unspools into the post-collegiate night.

Various Artists — [ITAL]How Long Can You Go? Anthology of the String Bass (1925-1941)[ITAL]